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Denial of Service (DoS) Affecting phpbb/phpbb package, versions <3.2.6

0.0
high

Snyk CVSS

    Attack Complexity Low
    Scope Changed
    Availability High

    Threat Intelligence

    EPSS 0.31% (70th percentile)
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NVD
7.5 high

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  • Snyk ID SNYK-PHP-PHPBBPHPBB-559859
  • published 2 May 2019
  • disclosed 2 May 2019
  • credit Unknown
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Introduced: 2 May 2019

CVE-2019-9826 Open this link in a new tab
CWE-400 Open this link in a new tab

How to fix?

Upgrade phpbb/phpbb to version 3.2.6 or higher.

Overview

phpbb/phpbb is a Forum Software application.

Affected versions of this package are vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS). The Fulltext native search component used within phpBB can be leveraged to cause long execution times, resulting in a Denial of Service attacks.

Improper input validation in the Native Fulltext Search component of phpBB 3.2.5 and earlier allows an unauthenticated remote user to trigger a denial of service attack via the keywords URL parameter of search.php.

Successful exploitation generates a slow SQL query which causes the database engine used by phpBB to consume all available CPU resources. Depending upon the database engine, users will also be completely unable to create or modify posts due to locks on the search index tables. The slowness of the query depends on the size of the search_wordlist and search_wordmatch tables.

Details

Denial of Service (DoS) describes a family of attacks, all aimed at making a system inaccessible to its intended and legitimate users.

Unlike other vulnerabilities, DoS attacks usually do not aim at breaching security. Rather, they are focused on making websites and services unavailable to genuine users resulting in downtime.

One popular Denial of Service vulnerability is DDoS (a Distributed Denial of Service), an attack that attempts to clog network pipes to the system by generating a large volume of traffic from many machines.

When it comes to open source libraries, DoS vulnerabilities allow attackers to trigger such a crash or crippling of the service by using a flaw either in the application code or from the use of open source libraries.

Two common types of DoS vulnerabilities:

  • High CPU/Memory Consumption- An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to take a disproportionate amount of time to process. For example, commons-fileupload:commons-fileupload.

  • Crash - An attacker sending crafted requests that could cause the system to crash. For Example, npm ws package